The psychopathic serial killer behind one of America's most misunderstood crimes has died

Kitty Genovese.WikipediaWinston Moseley, the man who killed Kitty Genovese in 1964 while neighbors reportedly ignored her pleas for help, died last week in prison at 81.

Moseley, a psychopathic serial killer and necrophiliac, was one of New York's longest-serving inmates, The New York Times reported Monday.

His gruesome rape and murder of 28-year-old Genovese more than 50 years ago is one of America's best-known crimes and was even featured on an episode of the New York-based HBO show "Girls" this week.

The case also appears in psychology textbooks as a classic example of the bystander effect, in which the presence of other people discourages people from intervening in an emergency.

In recent years, however, experts have called into question many aspects of the Genovese murder that were initially reported back in 1964.

The Times reported back then that 38 people had watched a killer "stalk and stab" Genovese. Those 38 neighbors in Kew Gardens, Queens, none of whom called the police, reportedly experienced a "diffusion of responsibility." In other words, they thought somebody else would help Genovese, who was barely more than 5 feet tall.

Winston Moseley's booking photograph.Wikimedia CommonsWhile psychologists went on to prove that the bystander effect is a real phenomenon, the parable of Kitty Genovese that inspired much of that research is largely false, according to experts who have revisited the case. It's not clear that 38 people actually saw the killing after all — or that nobody called the police.

''Yeah, there was a murder,'' lawyer Joseph DeMay, who has pored over the case, told The Times on the 40th anniversary of the murder. ''Yeah, people heard something. You can question how a few people behaved. But this wasn't 38 people watching a woman be slaughtered for 35 minutes and saying, 'Oh, I don't want to be involved.'"

The first in-depth account of the Genovese murder came two weeks after the crime, in a front-page story in The Times that took a damning view of the neighbors who failed to call the police. From that story, which appears to be based on police sources:

For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens ... Not one person telephoned the police during the assault; one witness called after the woman was dead.

Later, the story says, one neighbor "sheepishly" told the police, "I didn't want to get involved."

New York Times ScreenshotThe thought of a tiny woman getting stabbed while her neighbors watched was indeed horrifying, and the Genovese story quickly gained traction. The number of people who supposedly didn't help — 38 — was repeated again and again.

But people who have revisited the case have found crucial errors in The Times' account, as Nicholas Lemann wrote in The New Yorker around the 50th anniversary of the murder.

Here are the crucial facts, according to Lemann. Genovese's killer, Moseley, was driving around and looking for a victim when he spotted the young woman and followed her home. She parked across from her apartment, and he attacked her with a hunting knife. She screamed, and a neighbor named Walter Mozer opened his window and shouted, "Leave that girl alone."

Moseley drove off. Genovese, who was wounded but alive, ran into a vestibule of her apartment building. Moseley came back to the vestibule and attacked her again. The second, more brutal attack, occurred indoors, out of the view of most of her neighbors.

The Kew Gardens Long Island Rail Road station near 82-70 Austin Street in Queens, New York, seen March 6, 2014. AP Photo/Frank Franklin II While neighbors may have heard parts of the attack, DeMay, the lawyer who researched the case, told The Times that many of the neighbors believed the fight was a lovers' quarrel or a drunken argument. Moreover, according to Lemann, two neighbors did actually call the police.

"It was a time when the police weren't necessarily your friend," Cook told NPR. "You can't call a central dispatcher; you call the number on your yellow pages, usually, and then a desk sergeant, whoever picks up the phone, [a] communications officer, will take your report."

Of course, now people can just call 911 when urgent help is needed. Most people these days are also probably aware of the bystander effect, thanks to the mythology surrounding the Genovese case. In that sense, the (falsely reported) Genovese case may have inspired people to report violent crimes to the police.

Just a couple of years after Genovese's murder, The Times reported that Queens residents acted quickly to try to save a woman who was being attacked by an ax. Even then, the police were using the Genovese story as a cautionary tale.

One unnamed police officer told The Times, "It was the exact opposite of the Kitty Genovese affair."